15 Tools for Digital Marketing

Having a website for your small business just isn’t enough any more. Imagine you build a fancy new restaurant in the middle of nowhere – without promoting it, no one is going to know it exists.

This same logic applies to the internet.

Because there are so many businesses out there competing for your target audience, you really need to make an effort to boost your online visibility if you want to succeed. Your brands professional image also depends on your website, and if you’re not leveraging your website to find new customers, you’re already falling behind.

Many entrepreneurs know that having a website for their business is critical, but they lack the skills needed to boost their presence in the search engines. Search engine optimization or SEO is the term given to this marketing tactic, and it ties in nicely with content marketing, that is, the art of creating great content that people actually want to read.

Today we’re going to cover a number of tools for digital marketing, to help you get a snapshot of your current performance, as well as finding ways to improve. Now let’s get started.

TOOLS FOR DIGITAL MARKETING

SEO HEALTH CHECKS

Cognitive SEO. Gives access to a wide range of data points on your website, such as a full site audit and the ability to track your keyword rankings over time. There’s easy ways to view any potential harmful links that are hurting your SEO, as well as a neat visual explorer that makes it easy to understand how sites link back to your own. Plans start at $99 per month.

Crazy Egg. To better optimize your website for your audience, use this digital marketing tool to generate heat-maps which show where users are clicking on your site, and even get approximations to where they are looking. This data allows you to put the most relevant information (and call-to-actions) in the prime viewing spots. Their plans start from $9 a month, and there is 30 days free when you sign up.

MOZ Pro. This is a full suite of SEO tools for digital marketing that help you to easily track inbound data on a particular website. You can use their tools to identify link-building opportunities, see data on social activity, conduct keyword analysis and run complete site audits to give you the best possible picture of your website’s current SEO status. Plans range from $99 to $599 per month.

Screaming Frog. This program crawls your website analyzing your links, images and code, just like Google does, to offer recommendations on what needs to be fixed. One of the best reports it offers is the inbound and outbound link reports, which helps in your SEO outreach strategy and media campaigns. A free version with basic functionality is available, with yearly plans available for £99.

SEMrush. This tool focuses on keyword analysis, allowing you to find every keyword a particular website is ranking for in search results, as well as your direct competition. Using this insight you can create content based on the keywords driving the most traffic to your competitors, and start driving a larger audience to your site. A basic report is offered free, and plans start at $69.96 per month.

SimilarWeb. In addition to an insight to your website, SimilarWeb offers advice on what to improve, the keywords your competition is ranking for, and the current trends and patterns in search behavior within your industry. The snapshot overview of your key traffic sources makes understanding the data easy, and they offer a free report as well as professional plans that start at $199 per month.

CONTENT MARKETING OPTIMIZATIONS

Producing valuable content for your audience is almost as important as your SEO strategy, and keeping your website fresh with new content will have the search engines crawling it more frequently, which can increase your overall traffic. If you’re a small-business owner that’s just getting started, you’re probably still writing your own content, and these digital marketing tools will help.

HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator. Using three nouns, it creates five different blog posts for you to write about this week. The subjects are not always perfect, but it can be a good start for your research.

WebpageFX Topic Idea Generator. Uses your keyword to generate article ideas, and has a handy link to Google search so you can see if any other articles have already been written.

Social Crawlytics. Run your competitions blog’s through this tool and you will be able to see the amount of social interaction each of their posts has had across a wide range of social networks, to help give you insight to what your audience is most interested in.

Finally, before you post anything, run your article through Grammarly and Correctica to triple check your content before it goes live.

All of these tools for digital marketing are enablers, helping you to maintain good SEO practices with your website, and give you a host of ideas for new topics to keep your blog filled with great content.

Don’t let the amount of digital marketing tools overwhelm you at this stage, just pick one to get started on optimizing your website, today.